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W3C Southern Africa News

–Selectors level 4 Draft Published

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of Selectors Level 4.
Selectors are patterns that match against elements in a tree, and as
such form one of several technologies that can be used to select nodes
in an XML document. Selectors have been optimized for use with HTML and
XML, and are designed to be usable in performance-critical code. They
are a core component of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which uses
Selectors to bind style properties to elements in the document.
Selectors Level 4 describes the selectors that already exist in
[SELECT], and further introduces new selectors for CSS and other
languages that may need them. Learn more about the Style Activity.

–vCard Ontology Draft Published

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a Working Draft of vCard Ontology.
The document describes a mapping of the vCard specification (RFC6350)
to RDF/OWL. The goal is to promote the use of vCard for the description
of people and organisations utilising semantic web techniques and
allowing compatibility with traditional vCard implementations. Learn
more about the Semantic Web Activity.

–The PROV Family of Documents are W3C Recommendations

The Provenance Working Group was
chartered to develop a framework for interchanging provenance on the
Web. The Working Group has now published the PROV Family of Documents
as W3C Recommendations, along with corresponding supporting notes. You
can find a complete list of the documents in the PROV Overview Note.
PROV enables one to represent and interchange provenance information
using widely available formats such as RDF and XML. In addition, it
provides definitions for accessing provenance information, validating
it, and mapping to Dublin Core. Learn more about the Semantic Web.

–Publishing and Linking on the Web Note Published

The Technical Architecture Group has published a Group Note of Publishing and Linking on the Web.
The Web borrows familiar concepts from physical media (e.g., the notion
of a "page") and overlays them on top of a networked infrastructure
(the Internet) and a digital presentation medium (browser software).
This is a convenient abstraction, but when social or legal concepts and
frameworks relating documents, publishing and speech are applied to the
Web, the analogies can be misleading, for example, publishing a page on
the Web is fundamentally different from printing and distributing a
page in a magazine or book. Learn more about the Technical Architecture Group.

– Two Drafts Published by the Tracking Protection Working Group

Tracking Preference Expression (DNT).
This specification defines the technical mechanisms for expressing a
tracking preference via the DNT request header field in HTTP, via an
HTML DOM property readable by embedded scripts, and via properties
accessible to various user agent plug-in or extension APIs. It also
defines mechanisms for sites to signal whether and how they honor this
preference, both in the form of a machine-readable tracking status
resource at a well-known location and via a Tk response header field,
and a mechanism for allowing the user to approve exceptions to DNT as
desired.

Tracking Compliance and Scope.
This specification defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT)
preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this
preference.